cameras

April 20, 2015

When I go to europe for my yearly dose of skiing, sun, beer, and fun I take four cameras with me and generally will ski with all four Sony cameras: a HX-50; a6000; rx100m3; and a tx30. Each lives in a pocket somewhere on my person and I have a body/neck sling for the a6000 which I keep under my coat. Plus a plethora of other shite in my coat and bibs.

I stuff all this shit (plus two half-liter cans of beer) into my ski outfit:

and then ski around looking like the Michelin man:

It is actually hard to tell I am carrying all that crap. Nice suit huh? More on it later.

Anyway, I was looking at the size of the files from the last couple trips and notice this one was pretty small: 77.3 gigabytes with 4943 files. Compared to 164 gigabytes and 4559 files for Paradiski 2014, and 106 gigabytes and 4989 files for Octoberfest 2014. So, I took a lot of photos but a lot fewer videos. Heck, I only have 13 GoPro videos and 54 from Paradiski. I didn't take as many GoPro videos because a lot of time the light was awful or I just forgot. Opps.

April 19, 2015

A few days ago I wrote about how I had a SD card kinda crapping the bed and how I needed to find the photos on the card. Normally I would have downloaded the photos/videos from each card to my notebook computer every night so I avoid this problem. Well, when I finally arrived at my hotel in Selva, my notebook had the black screen of death and nothing worked to fix. Of course, I didn't have a recovery memory stick with me so I had no way to back up my photos and videos with an inoperable computer. I didn't think too much of it since I have about half a terabyte in SD and micro SD cards: if a card got full, just swap it. What I didn't think about was the basic reliability of said SD cards. I have a variety of makes of cards and haven't had any problem with them. The crapped out card is a Polaroid and never made so much as a hiccup. Until this trip. With no way to back up the daily photos.

So, here I have a card with probably 400 photos on it and no way to read or copy them, according to my computer. I go online and look for ways to revive my photos, and find a plethora of options. I use two services, Recuva and Z-A-Recovery and compare the results. Recuva has a little easier user interface to use and both are free (and ZAR pointedly demands no money for it's use nor does it request upgrading for a fee). But (and a huge BUT) in my book, ZAR recovered all of my images from the SD card (364 images/videos versus 109 recovered by Recuva). Two further points about ZAR: when it copied the JPEG/Raw images over to my computer, it included a third low quality JPEG for some unknown reason, and it converted the Raw images to TIFF files. Not a huge deal but something to consider.

Looking west at Sciliar massif from the western most point of Alpe di Siusi, the Spitzbuhl chair.

So, if you find yourself the proud owner of a SD card that is shitting the bed and your computer can't copy them, do a google search of Zero Assumption Recovery or ZAR, and rest easy.

The other question: how do you clean a card? Reformat. Hell, according to some reviews, ZAR will even recover images from cards that have been accidently reformatted. Amazing. Don't use anything else.

April 16, 2015

I started going through my photos today, or at least started moving them from the SD cards over to my computer when one card showing nothing on it. Crap. And I know I took hundreds of photos on that card but the computer shows nothing. Crap, crap, crap. Now to see if I can find some software online to fix it. Really don't want to lose 600 photos.

September 17, 2014

I few years ago I bought a Sony RX100 pocket camera and loved it. It took great photos and was small enough to fit into my pocket. It didn't have a great zoom capability nor did it have a tilt screen. Durability also was an issue as mine suddenly stopped working correctly about six months ago. The menu button doesn't work, the video button doesn't work, and I can't adjust any settings. Other than that, it still works and it lives in the bottom of my messenger bag as a "just-in-case" camera. Obviously, I needed to get a new one.

I got the newest model this past summer and have been very impressed with it so far. Couple of photos from it:

Another nice thing is the camera is wifi ready so a variety of apps can be downloaded from the Sony website and added to the camera. More on that later.

May 29, 2014

No, not because the old ones are screwing up; I just need more storage. Here is what I am looking at:

A Western Digital personal cloud storage: 16 terabytes. Now you would be correct in asking why in the world do I need 1 terabyte of additional storage much less 16 (which is somewhat a silly question since one terabyte of storage is so cheap now; hell, the portable HDD I took to Paradiski had two terabytes). Well, it's pretty simple and it has to do with my photos. I take a lot of photos and have two cameras set up to take both a JPEG and a RAW image every time I take a photo. JPEGs are great for quick posting on the web or emailing to friends, but they lose a lot of detail and you can't really play around with them much in photo editing programs. RAW images have a lot more information so you can really go nuts on tweaking the look of the photo. The program I was using (not Adobe Photoshop) is pretty tedious for working with RAW images; I have preferred the MS Photo Gallery program for its simple interface: just enough to get the job done of rectifying any huge mistakes I make in my photos. The problem is Photo Gallery can't work with a RAW image but it can work with a TIFF image, and the other program will take a RAW image and convert and save it as a TIFF image. So I start converting and saving and all is good and well with the world when I notice with one image the file size. I think something is wrong when it is five times the original 24 megabyte size or 115 megabytes. That can't be right I think. I poke around on the internet and lo and behold, it is. It suddenly dawns on me I need more storage space when I check the folder of one camera for one average day from my Paradiski ski trip and it is 16 gigabytes of TIFF images (maybe 125 photos). My Paradiski trip folder is about 160 gigabytes but that includes video. So around 80 gigabytes of photos. Toss out ten gigs as non-RAW and I still end up with upwards of 800 gigabytes of TIFF images.

A lot of the "pros" out on the internet suggest only keeping the best photos and tossing the rest. I do toss out the really badly focused or tilted/jarred photos as well as the odd photo of my hand or some such shit, but I am loathe to toss out anything else. I love how I can take as many photos as I want in a day with my cameras and cull out the crap later; that's the beauty of digital photos. I don't want to be stingy in taking them because how else can I remember a lot of my life? My brain is no where near cabable of remembering all that stuff. The photos can help take me back to my trip so not cutting back on those.

Another problem is backing the darn things up. With such large files, where can I do that? I have been using Pogoplug for the last year and it works well but something else a bit cheaper may have to be used also. I have heard about Amazon Glacier storage service and need to investigate it. Ay carumba.

May 14, 2014

I used my HX-50V fairly often in Paradiski and it took really good photos. My main camera was my RX-100 but I was experiencing some issues with it: the movie button doesn't work nor does the menu button so all the settings are fixed now. Sucks because it was a great camera. I need to replace it but I am waiting to see if Sony comes out with a camera like the HX-50V with better low-light recording and the ability to record RAW images but keeps the impressive zoom of the HX-50V. Anyway, the zoom of the HX-50V was very impressive as these images show:

Looking towards the ski area of Courchevel.

And the top station of the tram at Courchevel at 60x zoom. I see they are putting in a new lift to the right. No chairs or cable yet so still under construction. Not much room up there from what I remember.

Looking east towards the Grande Motte and the top of Tignes ski area. The Grande Motte is the rounded shorter mountain on the left at the skyline.

High zoom detail of one of the tram towers and glacier on the ridgeline below the Grande Motte. Impressive.

I do like this camera, I just wish it took better low light shots and had the ability to record RAW images. Still a great camera.

January 17, 2014

I have a few Davis & Sanford tripods and for the most part they are great: excellent quality and workmanship, durable, light, easy to use, and reasonably priced. One thing I don't like: each tripod has a different type of camera plate so if you want to use the same camera for multiple tripods you need different camera plates and buying multiple plates is not easy. Other than that, I didn't have a complaint at all. Until today that is: I got up before dawn to take some photos of the moonset and sunrise and took the Fusion tripod with me. Much to my surprise, the cold temps froze up all the joints in the tripod head, and I was only albe to use it with some difficulty. I hadn't gotten it wet or otherwise abused the tripod so I don't know why it was stuck this morning. Not good. I have a few other D&S tripods with a ball attachment and they aren't affected at all. Shitty design for winter.

January 08, 2014

I am continually amazed by the zoom capabilities out of this little camera. It is small enough to live in a thigh pocket of my ski pants and leave room for my iphone, yet it takes really good photos and has an excellent zoom.

photo of the moon at 60x zoom, no tripod but leaning on side of a building. Pretty damn good.

I do wish this camera had more zoom capabilities and could capture in RAW format. I suspect something is coming since this model is currently on sale on the Sony website and past experience shows when they put stuff on sale new models are coming up for sale. Yay!!!

October 31, 2013

About four years ago Sony came out with it's HX line of cameras with the idea of giving the average camera buff a reasonable camera with nice zoom capabilities. I bought the first model, the HX1 and was very happy with it despite the limiting factor of only 20x zoom and 8 megapixels. It did take pretty reasonable photos as these from my Chamonix trip in April 2010 attest:View from my hotel room.

Full zoom of top of Agiulle du Midi. I always felt the zoom was too little to be really effective and the inferior lens, low megapixels, and size of the camera limited it.

A few years later I bought the HX100 model with 16 megapixels and 30x zoom. Life was good.

Shot from hotel room in Laax of the ski area, no zoom. Not bad quality.

Another shot of the same area at the highest 30x zoom showing the top station of a gondola. Get nice details of the trees and structure. Pretty good.

This is a shot from a mountain restaurant at Saas Fee, looking south. Again, very good quality I think.

30x zoom of mountain peak in middle of prior photo. You can make out small people on top. Again, very good quality and much better than the old HX1.

I kept looking at the Sony website expecting a new camera soon, but the next model, the HX200V but no great upgrades except 2 more megapixels and GPS marking of your photos. Not worth shelling out another $450.

Suddenly this summer there was a flurry of activity from Sony with two new HX series cameras coming out: the HX50V and the HX300V. Both are 20.4 megapixels and the HX50V is 30x optical and 60x Clear Image Zoom (this means it can effectively zoom to 60x) and the HX300V has a 50x optical and 100x Clear Image Zoom. Both are pretty spendy with the HX50V being a bit cheaper at $450. I thought I would buy the less expensive 50v and save up for the 300v, imagining the larger zoom would be well worth it. Now I don't think I will bother.

The HX50V is quite a small camera considering the huge zoom capabililities, the large (if not confusing) number of picture effects and special functions available, and the large 20.4 megapixels. It is not much larger than my Sony RX100 and 4 inches long by two and half inches tall by one and a half inches thick. Still small enough to put in a pocket comfortably and considerably smaller than the HX300V. It takes excellent general photos and the zoom is great.

Our local cyclocross race this past Sunday.

Approximately a 40x zoom so still plenty left in the camera.

Some elk I spooked while on a tree photo trip.

Hand held 60x zoom of one of the bulls in the group. Impressive detail in photos and no blurriness from my hands despite no tripod. Very impressive steady shot technology in the camera.

The HX50V is comfortable in the hand with a fairly good rubber grip on the right side of the camera which allows it to be used one handed pretty well. For any zoom over 10x though I would use both hands just in case. The burst photo setting is fast, very fast, and almost too fast. If the action isn't fast enough you get the feeling of 10 photos of one very small bit of the action was taken. At the cyclocross races this past Sunday I took several photos of the competitors and the burst mode was so fast that I never got more than half a pedal stroke of a competitor, or about one second tops of action. Super fast, the fastest burst mode I have experienced with any Sony camera I have owned. The buttons on the back are a bit spaced out and the thumb pad is a bit small and placed in such a way that my thumb sometimes hits a botton at the wrong time. A larger pad here would be good. The camera has wifi enabled so with the Sony app on my apple iphone I can operate the camera remotely. Distance is good to about 150 feet and only very basic functions can be controlled by wifi. It does allow me to stand at one camera and shoot photos while also shooting photos with the HX50V from a good distance away via my iphone. I could take photos of the Cathedral Group of the Tetons with Old Man Tree in the picture and take photos of Mt. Moran and Old Man Tree at the same time without having to walk between the two cameras (I did this oct 27 and the distance between the two cameras was at least 100 feet). I like this feature enough that any new cameras from Sony will have to have wifi capabilities. I wish it had time lapse capabilities and most Sony cameras don't despite having almost too many other capabilities that I will never use. WTF Sony? Are you guys stupid? Another thing I don't like about the camera is the lousy night photos:

This is with the night tripod mode and I am steadying my hand against the roof rack of my car and this is the shit I ended up with. Crap. Pure crap.

Compare it to the photo taken with my Sony RX100 a few mornings earlier:

And this is freestanding no tripod no bracing against a car in auto mode. Much better.

Maybe the difference is in operator error. Not sure but the RX100 is better at night photos.

Overall I am quite happy with the HX50V and plan to take it to Europe with me. It takes good photos, has a great zoom, and is small enough to fit in a coat pocket with plenty of room left over. Score: 85 out of 100.